Gabriel Castro Wong, a Peruvian communicator and teacher, gave his journalistic training a twist. Photo: Jeremías Querevalu/La República
‘Gabito’ Castro – analogon Pardo y Aliaga’Goyito’ – was the older brother of Gundisalon and still the son of Vicon and Marita. Gabriel Castro – already discharged as a cripple – was a young man who gave up architecture and chose Communication, a university student who won twenty tons for the children’s gang, a doctor for “America’s deportation” and a reporter for “Domingo al día”. Now, at 43 years old, he is the husband of Lucia, the father of Luciana and Joaquin, a believer in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a beloved Tiktoker and head of public relations for Huawei. He, in his own words, is grateful.
He thanks, for example, the academic program to which he would like to return: teaching. During his time in Toulouse, San Martin de Porres, UCAL (Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de América Latina), SISE and Sistemas Perú, he claims that it helped him to reduce his introversion to privacy: “In the street, when everyone is looking at you. you focus on the lens, and the macro is the shield. On the other hand, in a room of 60 people, where you don’t have the right answer, that’s where it really comes out.
What was your first class topic?
– I want to end the first class by saying to them: “How much is the university salary?” Two or three hands raised. “(to) how many of this father, mother, sugar daddy or sugar mama are paid by the university?” Several hands were raised. “For those who go to university, you know what it costs to sit down. For those who don’t, someone outside breaks their c***s to warm the seat. So you use it, ask me.”
What is the most emotional moment in the classroom?
-At UCAL it was a very nice challenge: I taught people with autism and people with partial deafness (…). I sent the PPT the other day and the autistic youth were the only ones reading the class; They come just to ask. I’m a bit electric and I was walking around the room, but not with the deaf kids, with them I had a proper voice and I had before that they could see me, read my lips and understand what I was saying. They seemed very sweet to me.
Gabriel Castro with Boris Acuña in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Gabriel Castro/courtesy
streets, classrooms, street Two decades of journalism on América television have passed under the commemoration of a mother who describes her as a heroine not only because she annihilated cancer, but also because she convinced him to follow the decision of the last vocational test and forget the previous ones; “You will choose from this what you will live the rest of your life (…). I do not order, I give advice, he declared.
When his work shows the corpulence of the perimeter and he managed to obtain a master’s degree in Strategic Communication, with a repeat, Gabriel Castro Wong, who found the psychological warfare of the interview format attractive, jumped into the void and exited, in 2020, in the technical team.
– And if you love journalism, why do you leave the media and become public relations?
“Two things led me to it. There were rumors, because they did it spontaneously; So that the automatism took away my essence. Doves are doves, and I felt that I no longer had a roof. Knocked? It seems to me that they will never give it to me. Production? They were good departures , they were young, so that they would not abandon their positions (…). Making statements that are funny, because I was a joke in front of the screen, he had finally brought me down. I need another reason, I need to take a leap.
Also a great domestic theme. Huawei in June 2020. So I move, I cover the pandemic, the hardest part. I received incredible places, very painful (…). He enters the village, door D, he would go out, and at door B another man is already dead. My wife said to me: “I don’t want to see you there.” And 20 years later, she told me in a newspaper! It was very rare. I mean after the earthquake, the micro-commercialization of drugs, when it’s in Korea, to say something like that sounded strange to me.
All this prompted me to look for something else. I got to know LinkedIn. (laughs)
Appreciation from the channel – “I found a family. There is a father, you have a mother, you have brothers with whom you fight (…). But the family itself also protects you, covers you, and cooperates after the discussion – COVID and its inventory of the most painful and pleasant commissions.
The case of Ciro Castellae and Rosario Ponce in the middle of the rocks: “I covered myself from beginning to end and hard. Exciting but it’s hard that sometimes camouflaged me …). It happened to you in journalism “. In 2017 the earthquake in Mexico, his cameraman and coincidentally accompanied him: “I just came from interviewing Raúl Ruidíaz, who was in Morelia, before the World Cup (…). Jefferson and I were the only ones who, instead of leaving Mexico, wanted to stay. We have one more week to go.” Penalty after Peru’s defeat in the 2019 Copa América puts the event on a challenging list.
-We named you the top 3 complex. Let’s move on to the other side, what were the reports that he enjoyed the most?
– Interviewing Gilberto Santa Rosa in Puerto Rico was tasty, as he put it in these words: it was tasty. I went to a place called La Tienda Blanca or La Tiendecita Blanca, a restaurant where he started playing and singing a cappella. He told me about Eva Ayllón, he told me that he wanted to sing with Gian Marco, and then he said to me: “Get in the car, let’s go to my house.”
Then Theodoric Henry, Frank, a very good man, when he was at Barcelona, champion of the world. I had a chance to talk to him in Chile (…). And it wasn’t a conversation, but it meant a lot to me: I was a meter and a half from Francisco Pope Trujillo. God! It was spectacular to me that, although it was true, he didn’t tell me much, he only told me that it was delicious food, he gave me his blessing. The coverage was very long. I remember very clearly: I was wearing a lead suit and I was able to run with my underpants.
– Let’s go to the challenges, what was the first Huawei you took?
-The biggest challenge was to prove if someone was good. I felt like Michael Jordan when he left basketball after six championships with the Chicago Bulls. Five! Then he returned, and made Six. Well, Michael Jordan went from being a basketball player to being a baseball player. Unfortunately, it was not good. I am certainly a survivor (…). Rather, I was a journalist who had run away from press conferences, who had run away from public relations. Now I am across (…). It was hard for me to understand marketing… Now I can talk about KPIs.
(…) I am helpless. I have more photographic memory. Learning the names of 25 different products, each with distinctive features, was also a challenge for me.
What professional goals do you want to achieve?
– It is important to say for … How do young people say now? The decision?
– Did you show up?
“Manifest, manifest.” My short-term goal is to do public relations in an American or European society, to learn a different philosophy. Because obviously Chinese society has its own philosophy. In the long term I would like to do public relations in a regional area. It’s ugly but it’s not. What works in Colombia doesn’t work in Peru and what works in Chile doesn’t work in Argentina. Seeing this kind of thing seems super interesting to me. That’s what I’m looking for. And to teach.
Getting used to leisure during the holidays was also a struggle. “On July 28, 2019, I had a bridge. A bridge! I ask Lucy: ‘What happened?’ I did not use it. For me, on the 28th of July, it was in the Palace, on the outskirts of the Congress. On the 29th, it was in the military parade.”
-And what do you do on Sunday?
-1 At Mass on Sundays. I will try to go early. I visit my mother, I visit my father-in-law. I am very familiar. My Sunday ends up doing grocery shopping for the week. Or sometimes at Santa Anita, at the farmer’s market.
Also, reading “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and continuing with the fifth season of “Ninjago” are covered activities. He admits that when Ricardo’s father, a philosophy teacher at St. Augustine’s school, explained to him the concept of the vision, he affirmed that he would have a family and that his children would grow up properly. “Can you believe it? At 16 years old!” Gabriel Castro, as a husband and as a father, was destined in the same way: “I am a boy, I am a boy.”
Gabriel walks with his family: Luciana and Joaquín, their children and Lucia, his wife. Photo: Instagram
“You said he was a quiet boy in his childhood, but you must remember something bad.”
-There are some killers in the game. For example, Domund or Teletón gave a piggy bank. And we said: “Master, I must go out with the piggy bank.” Nothing. We want to end with someone at home watching a rental movie from Blockbuster or somewhere that sold hamburgers.
I once had a Natural Science project and there was a classmate who was touching and touching a volcano that was supposed to erupt. Then I would say: Do not touch; Don’t touch her. He pushed me, I, who was never going to fight, hit him and broke his nose. I began to cry. I started to cry because he had done it. The teacher realized that he was on the defensive and without that my classmates told him: “Gabriel didn’t even put the papers in the notebook.”
Gabriel Castro in the facilities of the school of San Agustin. Photo: Gabriel Castro/courtesy
– One last question, is the press good bye?
It is said that the following: “Never never.”
Another adage and focus in his life belongs to Pole Ryszard Kapuściński: “You must be a good journalist, above all a good person.” Gabriel chose the place to expand all the professions.
